Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 145: Fri May 26

Veronika Voss (Fassbinder, 1982): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm


The excellent Rainer Werner Fassbinder season continues at the BFI Southbank with this 35mm screening. Full details of the season can be found here. This film is also being screened on May 29th and you can find all the details here.

Little White Lies review:
This is representative of Fassbinder’s astounding “BDR trilogy”, made right at the tail end of his career (including 1979’s The Marriage of Maria Braun and 1981’s Lola). Veronika Voss, his penultimate film, appears to foretell his own demise as it follows a sports journalist who begins to snoop into the life of a mysterious cabaret singer (Rosel Zech) who once performed for the Nazis and even, allegedly, got physical with Goebbels. This is like Fassbinder’s twist on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd, but instead of focusing on a laughable grotesque, it’s about a glamorous ghost attempting and failing to live a frazzled duel existence. The glistening black-and-white photography lends this deeply sombre tale a nostalgic visual counterpoint – like its tragic heroine, its trapped and torn between changing times.

David Jenkins

This review is from a Fassbinder top ten films article in Little White Lies that places this movie at No1 in the director's work. You can read the full piece here.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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